Time-lapse movies made from a series of pictures taken by NASA's Hubble Space Telescope are showing astronomers that young stars and their surroundings can change dramatically in just weeks or months. As with most children, a picture of these youngsters taken today won't look the same as one snapped a few months from now. The movies show jets of gas plowing into space at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour and moving shadows billions of miles in size.
The young star systems featured in the movies, XZ Tauri and HH 30, reside about 450 light-years from Earth in the Taurus-Auriga molecular cloud, one of the nearest stellar nurseries to our planet. Both systems are probably less than a million years old, making them relative newborns, given that stars typically live for billions of years. Hubble's Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 first observed them in 1995. Those views were so intriguing that additional images were taken in 1998, 1999, and 2000. The pictures were then combined into movies that document startling activity in the early stages of a star's life.
Stars form in clouds of gas and dust that collect into a swirling disk. Outflows of gas, like the bubbles and jets seen in these images, occur when some of the material feeding the infant star from the surrounding disk is diverted away by the star's magnetic field and accelerated out its magnetic poles. These outflows are often squeezed into narrow jets that can extend many light-years away from the star. Such outflows are a common and natural result of stellar birth.
Credits
XZ Tauri Credits: NASA, John Krist (Space Telescope Science Institute), Karl Stapelfeldt (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), Jeff Hester (Arizona State University), Chris Burrows (European Space Agency/Space Telescope Science Institute)HH 30 Credits: NASA, Alan Watson (Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico, Mexico), Karl Stapelfeldt (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), John Krist (Space Telescope Science Institute) and Chris Burrows (European Space Agency/ Space Telescope Science Institute)
| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | XZ Tauri, HH 30 |
| Constellation | Taurus |
| About The Data | |
| Data Description | Hubble Space Telescope WFPC2 Imaging of XZ Tauri: Time Evolution of a Herbig-Haro Bow Shock: A Variable Asymmetry in the Circumstellar Disk of HH 30: |
| Instrument | HST>WFPC2 |
| Exposure Dates | 1995, 1998, and 2000 |
| About The Object | |
|---|---|
| Object Name | A name or catalog number that astronomers use to identify an astronomical object. |
| Object Description | The type of astronomical object. |
| R.A. Position | Right ascension – analogous to longitude – is one component of an object's position. |
| Dec. Position | Declination – analogous to latitude – is one component of an object's position. |
| Constellation | One of 88 recognized regions of the celestial sphere in which the object appears. |
| Distance | The physical distance from Earth to the astronomical object. Distances within our solar system are usually measured in Astronomical Units (AU). Distances between stars are usually measured in light-years. Interstellar distances can also be measured in parsecs. |
| Dimensions | The physical size of the object or the apparent angle it subtends on the sky. |
| About The Data | |
| Data Description |
|
| Instrument | The science instrument used to produce the data. |
| Exposure Dates | The date(s) that the telescope made its observations and the total exposure time. |
| Filters | The camera filters that were used in the science observations. |
| About The Image | |
| Image Credit | The primary individuals and institutions responsible for the content. |
| Publication Date | The date and time the release content became public. |
| Color Info | A brief description of the methods used to convert telescope data into the color image being presented. |
| Orientation | The rotation of the image on the sky with respect to the north pole of the celestial sphere. |
